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New European
a day ago
- General
- New European
Sebastião Salgado, Brazil's poet of dignity and decay
The 81-year-old was an economist who became an extraordinary photographer, who then became a powerful force for environmental regeneration. Instituto Terra led the reforestation of 17,000 acres of land in Brazil, planting more than three million trees so far. 'We can rebuild the planet that we destroyed, and we must,' Salgado once said. It is work that will continue under his partner, Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado, and their two sons. 'He sowed hope where there was devastation.' That was part of the message from Instituto Terra, the Brazilian non-profit conservation charity, last week announcing the death of its co-founder, the great Sebastião Salgado. Shrouded against the morning wind, refugees wait in the Korem camp, Ethiopia, 1984 The Brooks Range, Alaska, June and July 2009 Chinstrap penguins in the South Sandwich Islands, 2009 Photos: Sebastião Salgado/nbpictures The programme was financed by Salgado's photography, his trademark black and white images that appear to be lit by God. They explore mankind's deep connection to places being ripped apart by the 'progress' of industry. Perhaps most famous are his almost biblical shots of scores of workers toiling like ants in the Serra Pelada goldmine. His speciality, he said, was 'the dignity of humanity'. Salgado was a 29-year-old working in the coffee industry when Lélia bought a camera in 1971. Within weeks, he had one of his own, then a darkroom, then work as a freelance news photographer. He progressed to become a staff photographer at the industry's most celebrated agencies – including Sygma and Magnum – before branching out with Lélia on large-scale documentary projects of their own. Subjects included disappearing wildlife, displaced people fleeing war and climate catastrophe, Kuwaiti oil fires, and tribes from the Amazon to the Arctic. Around 50,000 men work in the opencast Serra Pelada goldmine in the state of Pará in Brazil, 1986 Sebastião Salgado in 2023 Photos: Sebastião Salgado/nbpictures; Francesco Prandoni/Getty Salgado was proud of forging close relationships with the people he photographed, claiming that the success of the Serra Pelgada photos – which caused a sensation when published by the Sunday Times in the late 1980s – was because 'I know every one of those miners, I've lived among them. They are all my friends.' His quest for the real came at a cost; he died of leukaemia, his bone marrow function having been badly damaged by malaria contracted on a work trip to New Guinea in 2010. Yet his beautiful images of people in extremis saw Salgado called by some a hypocritical exploiter. A 1980s campaign for Silk Cut cigarettes, in which tribesmen from Papua New Guinea carried the famous purple silk, proved particularly controversial. It was a charge Salgado rejected, telling the Guardian last year: 'They say I was an 'aesthete of misery' and tried to impose beauty on the poor world. But why should the poor world be uglier than the rich world? The light here is the same as there. The dignity here is the same as there.'
Arabian Post
3 days ago
- General
- Arabian Post
Sebastião Salgado, Master of Monochrome, Dies at 81
Sebastião Salgado, the Brazilian photographer whose haunting black-and-white images chronicled the human condition and environmental fragility, died on 23 May 2025 in Paris at the age of 81. His death was attributed to leukaemia, a condition linked to malaria he contracted during a 2010 assignment in Indonesia. Born on 8 February 1944 in Aimorés, Minas Gerais, Salgado initially pursued a career in economics, earning a master's degree from the University of São Paulo. His trajectory shifted in the early 1970s when, while working for the International Coffee Organization, he began photographing coffee plantations in Africa. This experience ignited a passion for photography that led him to abandon economics and dedicate himself fully to documenting global social issues. Salgado's work is distinguished by its profound empathy and meticulous composition. Over five decades, he travelled to more than 130 countries, capturing images that highlighted the dignity and resilience of people facing adversity. His seminal projects include 'Workers' , a tribute to manual labourers worldwide; 'Exodus' , documenting mass migrations and displacements; and 'Genesis' , a visual homage to the planet's pristine landscapes and indigenous cultures. ADVERTISEMENT His commitment to long-term projects allowed him to delve deeply into his subjects, often spending years on a single series. This approach garnered both acclaim and criticism; while many praised the aesthetic and emotional power of his images, some argued that his portrayal of suffering risked romanticising hardship. Salgado defended his methodology, asserting that his intent was to bear witness and provoke reflection. In the 1990s, after witnessing the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, Salgado experienced a period of profound personal crisis. He withdrew from photography and returned to Brazil, where he and his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, embarked on an ambitious reforestation project on his family's degraded farmland. This endeavour led to the founding of Instituto Terra in 1998, a non-profit organisation dedicated to environmental restoration and education. Over the years, the institute has planted millions of trees, revitalising the Atlantic Forest and serving as a model for sustainable development. Salgado's contributions to photography and environmentalism earned him numerous accolades, including the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Grant, the Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal, and the Praemium Imperiale. He was also a member of the French Academy of Fine Arts and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2014, his life and work were chronicled in the documentary 'The Salt of the Earth,' co-directed by his son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and filmmaker Wim Wenders. In his later years, Salgado turned his lens towards the natural world, producing images that celebrated the planet's biodiversity and underscored the urgency of conservation. His 'Amazônia' project, published in 2021, is a testament to this shift, featuring photographs of the Amazon rainforest and its indigenous inhabitants. This body of work reflects his belief that humanity's fate is inextricably linked to the health of the environment.
Straits Times
3 days ago
- General
- Straits Times
Sebastiao Salgado, acclaimed Brazilian photographer, dies at 81
Brazilian photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado among his works on show at the exhibition, Amazonia: Photographs By Sebastiao Salgado at the National Museum of Singapore, in November 2024. PHOTO: ST FILE Rio de Janeiro - Sebastiao Salgado, a celebrated Brazilian photographer whose striking images of humanity and nature in the Amazon rainforest and beyond won him some of the world's top honours and made him a household name, died on May 23 in Paris. He was 81. His death was announced by Instituto Terra, the environmental nonprofit that he and his wife founded in Brazil. His family cited leukemia as the cause, saying that Salgado had developed the illness after contracting a particular type of malaria in 2010 while working on a photography project in Indonesia. 'Through the lens of his camera, Sebastiao tirelessly fought for a more just, humane and ecological world,' Salgado's family said in a statement. 'Rich in humanistic content, this work offers a sensitive perspective on the most disadvantaged populations and addresses the environmental issues threatening our planet.' Working mostly in black and white, Salgado garnered widespread acclaim at home and abroad with his striking images of the natural world and the human condition, often travelling around the globe to photograph impoverished and vulnerable communities. In all, he worked in more than 120 countries throughout his career. Salgado was especially interested in the plight of workers and migrants, and spent decades documenting nature and people in the Amazon rainforest. He captured some of his most well-known images in 1986, when he photographed workers toiling in a gold mine in the northern Brazilian state of Para. The photo essay cemented Salgado's reputation as one of the star photographers of his time. In the 1980s, Salgado also moved audiences worldwide with a series of pictures depicting the famine in Ethiopia. That work earned him worldwide recognition and won some of photography's most prestigious awards. In 1991, while on assignment in Kuwait, Salgado photographed workers struggling to extinguish oil-well fires set by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's troops, an environmental disaster that came to define Iraq's turbulent retreat from Kuwait. 'The photos were beyond extraordinary,' said Ms Kathy Ryan, a former photo director at The New York Times Magazine, who worked with Salgado on that assignment. 'It was one of the best photo essays ever made.' His Kuwait photos were featured on the cover of the magazine. On another noteworthy assignment, Salgado documented dramatic scenes following a failed assassination attempt on then United States President Ronald Reagan in 1981. He photographed the gunman John Hinckley Jr, moments after he was tackled to the ground. 'Everyone knows he had an incredible way of making pictures,' Ms Ryan said. But, she added, he also had an uncanny sense of 'where important stories were'. Known for his intense blue-eyed gaze and his rapid way of speaking, Salgado was remembered by his colleagues as a defender of documenting the human condition who respected the people he photographed. He was at times criticised for cloaking human suffering and environmental catastrophe in a visually stunning aesthetic, but Salgado maintained that his way of capturing people was not exploitative. 'Why should the poor world be uglier than the rich world?' he asked in an interview with British newspaper The Guardian in 2024. 'The light here is the same as there. The dignity here is the same as there.' Over the course of his career, Salgado's work won some of photography's top prizes, including two Leica Oskar Barnack Awards and several World Press Photo awards. He was named an honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992 and the French Academy of Fine Arts in 2016. Sebastiao Ribeiro Salgado Jr was born on Feb 8, 1944, in Aimores, in the countryside of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. The only son of a cattle-ranching family, he had seven sisters. While studying at university in the 1960s, he met his future wife Lelia Deluiz Wanick. When a military dictatorship came into power in Brazil a few years later, the couple moved to France. His wife survives him, as do two sons, Juliano and Rodrigo, and two grandchildren. An economist by training, Salgado discovered photography while working for the World Bank and travelling to Africa. He began his career as a freelance photographer in 1973 and quickly rose through the ranks to become one of the most renowned photographers at the Magnum collective. In 1994, Salgado left Magnum to form his own agency together with his wife and longtime collaborator. He later spent years travelling across the Amazon. He captured arresting images of vast rivers and rainforests while also documenting the impact of human beings on natural landscapes and the Indigenous people fighting to preserve them. In the late 1990s, Salgado and his wife founded Instituto Terra in the region where he was born, with the aim of restoring the Atlantic Forest, which had been ravaged by human encroachment. Salgado's 'vision and humanity', American photographer and photojournalist Steve McCurry posted on Instagram, 'left an indelible mark on the world of photography'. NYTIMES Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Forbes
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Legendary Brazilian Photographer Sebastião Salgado Has Died At 81
Sebastião Salgado at his exhibition at Les Franciscaines cultural center in Deauville It is with deep sorrow that we bid farewell to Sebastião Salgado, one of the most visionary and compassionate photographers of our time, who passed away on May 23, 2025 in Paris from leukemia. For over five decades, he dedicated his life to bearing witness to the beauty and suffering of our world, crafting an unparalleled body of work that gave voice to the most vulnerable and revealed the fragile majesty of our planet. With his lifelong partner, Lélia Wanick Salgado, he created images that transcended photojournalism – offering instead a poetic, unflinching reflection on human dignity, resilience and the urgent need for environmental stewardship. Together, Sebastião and Lélia not only transformed how we see the world, but actively helped to heal it through the Instituto Terra, a reforestation initiative in Aimorés in the state of Minas Gerais in his native Brazil that has planted more than three million trees. From war zones to remote landscapes, his lens never flinched, even as his own health declined after contracting a rare form of malaria in 2010 in Indonesia during his 'Genesis' project. Complications from that illness ultimately led to a severe form of leukemia that claimed his life. He leaves behind not just a towering photographic legacy, but a living testament to hope, endurance and the possibility of renewal – survived by his beloved wife, their sons Juliano and Rodrigo, and grandchildren Flávio and Nara. Salgado's spirit will undoubtedly live on through the countless lives he touched and the timeless images he created. His work is currently being celebrated in the 'Amazônia' exhibition at Tour & Taxis in Brussels until November 9, 2025 displaying more than 200 large-format photographs that capture the breathtaking richness of the Amazon rainforest and the lives of its indigenous peoples, accompanied by an original soundtrack composed by Jean-Michel Jarre, as well as a major survey show at Les Franciscaines cultural center in Deauville, France, on view until June 1, 2025, presented in collaboration with the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. The Q&A that follows was one of the final interviews Salgado gave before his death, offering a powerful reflection on his life's work, values and vision for the world. Sebastião Salgado, Greater Burhan oil field, Kuwait, 1991, MEP Collection, Paris How did your relationship with black-and-white photography begin? At first, I did a lot of color. When I started working for the press, I had to make a living. Magazines in the '70s and '80s didn't publish black-and-white photos. All the commissions we had were in color. But never in my life was I a photographer of color. Color bothered me enormously from focusing on my image. At the time, we worked with slides, which had high-contrast colors. I knew that blues and reds were going to become hugely important visually when I looked at the final image, and it made me lose all the focus I had on a person's dignity and personality. Black and white is an abstraction. Nothing is in black and white. But there I transformed all the color ranges into grayscale, and everything became a range of grays where I could focus on wherever I wanted. One of your most iconic projects is your documentation of the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil. What made that experience so powerful? In 1986, I did a story on the gold mine in Brazil. It was discovered in 1980. I had tried to go to this mine in '80, '81, '82, '83, '84, '85. I never had permission because it was the Brazilian army that controlled this mine. I was very close to a guerrilla movement in Brazil that was the number one enemy of the army. But in 1986, they left the mine, and it was the cooperative –people who had the concession and the workers – that were in charge, and they allowed me to come. I hadn't published my photos because it wasn't worth it – magazines didn't publish in black and white at the time. They only published in color. It took at least six or seven months to get them published. But when Magnum, where I was, decided to diffuse them, Jimmy Fox, the publisher, said, 'This story is exceptional.' The Sunday Times Magazine gave me 10 pages and the cover. It was exceptional in black and white, as we hadn't published in black and white for 15 years. Right away, The New York Times Magazine did the same. Three weeks later, it was Paris Match and Stern. We broke the code of color with this story. And from then on, it was possible for me to abandon color photography and work only in black and white. Sebastião Salgado, Serra Pelada Gold Mine, State of Pará, Brazil, 1986, MEP Collection, Paris You've dedicated your life to long, immersive projects. What toll has this work taken on your body? I wore out my body a lot. I had an operation on my Achilles tendon. The Istanbul police attacked me and broke my Achilles tendon. I broke my knees twice; I have a mechanical knee. I had an operation on the tendon in my left shoulder and my right shoulder tendon. I've had a lot of accidents. I broke my machine producing red and white blood cells. And I'm a little battered. At 81 years old, I'm trying to hold on a little bit, to see if I can live a few more years. The projects I did in photography were long-term projects. I've worked on stories that took me five or eight years, and if I take on a project like that now, I might not get to the end because I might disappear before then. You've spoken about a health crisis that changed your life. What happened? I caught a very strong form of malaria – plasmodium falciparum – the strongest of the malarias. And I treated the malaria, but my doctor in Paris, in the service of Professor Gentilini at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, said, 'Sebastião, when you get falciparum, you have to rest for at least four to six months because it attacks the whole body. You are weakened everywhere.' And I said, 'Yes, you're right.' But a fortnight later, I was on the Colorado Plateau working because I had a whole expedition organized with guides, assistants, everything, to get to this wonderful part of the world. I was so tired that I couldn't walk properly anymore. When I returned to Paris, my immunological defense was zero. I got an infection in a dental implant and had a generalized infection. I took a brutal load of antibiotics. Everything was awakened in my body, except one thing: my machine to produce white blood cells, red blood cells, platelets. It was broken. It was a kind of cancer that I caught. The doctors who treat me are doctors who treat cancer. I've been taking medication for 15 years. It more or less resolves the problem, and I can travel, work, do everything. I did a whole project in the Amazon afterwards. But then a few months ago in Brazil, my body denied these drugs that I had been taking for 15 years. You've spoken about giving up photography after witnessing the genocide in Rwanda in the early 2000s and becoming sick. What happened? While we were in Brazil resting, my parents became old. I am from a family of eight children. I have seven sisters, but I am the only son. And there, my parents made the decision to give our farm, the farm where I was born, to Lélia and I. And I made the decision to give up photography. Lélia and I would become farmers. We were going to give up everything, take this farm and start planting grass for cattle. We came back to Paris and we returned to Brazil during Christmas. My father had rented a bulldozer to build a road that goes up the mountain. The farm is huge, and it was the rainy season. There was heavy rain and the rain carried away all the earth that the bulldozer had dug up. It killed our stream, a beautiful stream in which I'd swum with caimans when I was a child. We lived in this stream, and we killed the stream. Lélia said to me, 'You're not a farmer. I'm not a farmer. We're going to take this land and plant the forest that was here before.' And little by little, we started to rehabilitate a forest. We were not activists in any movement. But today, we are ecologists. Sebastião Salgado, Shaman ngelo Barcelos (Koparihewë, which means 'Head of Song' or 'Voice of Nature'), from the community of Maturacá, interacts with Xapiri spirits in visions during an ascent to Pico da Neblina, the highest mountain in Brazil. For the Yanomami, it is a sacred place called Yaripo. Yanomami Indigenous Territory, State of Amazonas, 2014 How did immersing yourself and reconnecting with nature through growing a forest lead you to rediscover your passion for photography and inspire your project, 'Genesis', thereby making the transition from people to nature as your central interest? It gave meaning to 'Genesis'. I had given up photography. While we were in Brazil, I simply did a photography project because I'm a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and UNICEF asked me to make a book about the end of polio. Although I was no longer a photographer, I went to a lot of countries around the world for this project with UNICEF. We published a book in New York. Seeing this forest come to life in Brazil is wonderful because a tree, even a small tree, gives leaves, flowers and fruit, and then the insects come, so do the birds, then the mammals. We saw life and the birth of a forest. That gave me the crazy desire to go and photograph there, but no longer our species, to go and photograph all the other species. That's when, with Lélia, we conceived a series of trips over eight years, to go around the world to photograph the pristine part of the planet, the part that hasn't been destroyed. And that's how 'Genesis' was born. We have destroyed a good part of our biodiversity, but we still have 47 % of the planet – almost half of the planet – that's still here. It's not the easiest part to destroy because these are the deserts, the very cold part of the planet, the very high lands, the very humid lands. They are intact. Over eight years, I made 32 trips to 32 countries or regions of the world, from the Arctic to Antarctica, but the greatest journeys I've ever gone on are within myself, to discover that I am one single species among thousands of other species, and each one is as important as ours. I was in total despair when I finished the Rwanda project. When I stopped, my hope was dead. And after, my hope was reborn, no longer based on the human species, but based on all the other species on the planet. If we disappear, and we will disappear, because we are programmed to end, the planet will completely reconstitute itself. I believe in evolution, that it's the history of this planet. The planet is fantastic.
Time of India
4 days ago
- General
- Time of India
Sebastiao Salgado, acclaimed Brazilian photographer, is dead
Sebastiao Salgado (AP) Sebastiao Salgado, a celebrated Brazilian photographer whose striking images of humanity and nature in the Amazon rainforest and beyond won him some of the world's top honours and made him a household name, died Friday in Paris. He was 81. His death was announced by Instituto Terra, the environmental nonprofit that he and his wife founded in Brazil. His family cited leukemia as the cause, saying that Salgado had developed the illness after contracting a particular type of malaria in 2010 while working on a photography project in Indonesia. "Through the lens of his camera, Sebastiao tirelessly fought for a more just, humane and ecological world," Salgado's family said in a statement. Working mostly in black and white, Salgado garnered widespread acclaim at home and abroad with his striking images of the natural world and the human condition, often travelling around the globe to photograph impoverished and vulnerable communities. In all, he worked in more than 120 countries throughout his career. Salgado was especially interested in the plight of workers and migrants, and spent decades documenting nature and people in the Amazon rainforest. He captured some of his most well-known images in 1986, when he photographed workers toiling in a gold mine in northern Brazil. The photo essay was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine and cemented Salgado's reputation as one of the star photographers of his time. In the 1980s, Salgado also moved audiences worldwide with a series of pictures depicting the famine in Ethiopia. That work earned him worldwide recognition and won some of photography's most prestigious awards. In 1991, while on assignment in Kuwait, Salgado photographed workers struggling to extinguish oil-well fires set by Saddam Hussein's troops, an environmental disaster that came to define Iraq's turbulent retreat from Kuwait. "The photos were beyond extraordinary," said Kathy Ryan, a former photo director at The New York Times Magazine, who worked with him on that assignment. "It was one of the best photo essays ever made. " On another noteworthy assignment, Salgado documented dramatic scenes following a failed assassination bid on President Ronald Reagan in 1981. He photographed the gunman, John Hinckley Jr, moments after he was tackled to the ground. "He had an uncanny sense of where important stories were," said Ryan. Known for his intense blue-eyed gaze and his rapid way of speaking, Salgado was remembered by his colleagues as a defender of documenting the human condition who respected the people he photographed. He was at times criticised for cloaking human suffering and environmental catastrophe in a visually stunning aesthetic, but Salgado maintained that his way of capturing people was not exploitative. "Why should the poor world be uglier than the rich world?" he asked in an interview with The Guardian in 2024. "The light here is the same as there. The dignity here is the same as there." Over the course of his career, Salgado's work won some of photography's top prizes, including two Leica Oskar Barnack Awards and several World Press Photo awards. Sebastiao Ribeiro Salgado Jr was born Feb 8, 1944, in Aimores, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. An economist by training, Salgado discovered photography while working for the World Bank and traveling to Africa.
